


I'll Be So Still For You

by grand_adventure_running



Category: Hemlock Grove
Genre: Angst, M/M, Mention of Mental Health Issues, Post Season 1, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-01
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-06-05 14:20:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6708145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grand_adventure_running/pseuds/grand_adventure_running
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A possible reunion. Roman’s a mess and Peter comes back determined. Post S1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Be So Still For You

**Author's Note:**

> Both written and set post-season 1. One of my takes on how their reunion could have gone before season two had premiered. Title from “Take Me Home” by Perfume Genius

The Rumanceks come back. Roman is home when he hears about it. The news is passed through town like wildlife from the moment someone notices a car parked next to their mailbox. When the whispers make their way to the Godfrey mansion, it petrifies Roman, shocks him completely still. He stands out in the yard and looks down at the forest, at the gap in the trees that hints at where their trailer still sits, even though he can’t actually see it. He’s not sure how to react, what he’s feeling. It’s taken him a while to get used to the blasted-out crater in his life and he’s not sure if he can just put a piece back.

“Roman. Come inside.”

He’s shaking.

Norman takes him by the arm, takes him back into his empty castle, and shuts the door behind him. “I’m sorry,” Norman says, speaking in his calm doctor register. “I knew it would be a shock for you. I should have said it differently.”

“How else would you say it?” Roman asks. “He’s back.”

His uncle studies him. “How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know.”

Norman feels his pulse and looks at his eyes and then hands him a pill, something that’s supposed to make him calm and relaxed. He’s been taking them on and off as per Norman’s instruction for the past year. It helps a little and Roman has refused to take them occasionally, and he feels like he should now.

Peter’s back. It means something. What he’s feeling, he should be feeling.

Norman has been trying to keep him from nervous breakdowns, from depression, from attacks of anxiety through medication and therapy and it hasn’t always worked. Sometimes, when he’s in the house walking from room to room his heart will start racing for no reason he can pinpoint. He’s woken up crying. He’s lost track of time. He dropped out of school for a whole month while his uncle was observing him—but that was earlier, when everything was still fresh. He’s succumbed to bouts of random violence, to substance abuse, to cycles of binging on certain foods and then refusing to eat. Norman keeps the house clean and safe, not quite like a gigantic hospital room, but close. Nearly everything potentially dangerous has been removed or locked down.

He’s been doing better, lately. He’s been getting a grip on things, but now Peter is back and he’s not sure what will happen when he sees him. He wants to find out and he also doesn’t want to see him again.

“I’m not taking this,” Roman tells his uncle and gives the pill back.

Norman blinks and then nods. “Okay.” He takes the medication back to the kitchen, where he’ll put it back in the locked cupboard.

Roman rubs his fingers together. He doesn’t get nosebleeds anymore. He’s not sure if this is something about himself that he should be afraid of. All he can think now is that maybe Destiny would know, maybe Peter could ask.

It’s bizarre, how quickly he’s flipped that switch in his head from “stop thinking about Peter” to “it’s okay to think about Peter.” He should laugh, but he looks out the window instead.

\--

He forgoes the meds the next morning, too. Norman frowns at him throughout breakfast and he has to resist ordering him to drop it for right now. His heart pounds all the way to school. Hands shake when he locks up the car. Palms sweaty on the handle of his attaché case. Goes back and forth between looking around and keeping his eyes focused in front of him. When he reaches the hallway where his locker is, he slows down. It seems too far, those couple dozen steps, and he can only hear his heartbeat in his ears. He doesn’t know where Peter could be, when he could appear, and the thought makes his skin prickle.

Roman licks his lips and scans the crowd for familiar ruffled hair, for a black leather jacket, or a brown vest. He looks for those dark eyebrows and green eyes, but doesn’t see them. Takes it as his chance and turns around, leaves the school. On his way back to his car, he looks over his shoulder and there he is.

Peter’s standing on the lawn, beside the steps that lead up to the main doors. He plucks a cigarette from his mouth, stares. It’s been so long since Roman has smoked. He wants go over to him and take that cigarette from him, place his lips there where Peter’s had been and inhale nicotine calm. He doesn’t because he feels like he’s going to stop breathing altogether. Peter looks impassive, brows slanted down against the morning light, mouth pursed as he exhales a plume of smoke.

When Roman slips into his car and pulls out of the school’s parking lot, it feels a lot like running. Part of him wants to give Peter a taste of what he’d done, but it’s petty and childish and Roman doesn’t think he’s capable of that anymore. It doesn’t matter what it seems like because he knows exactly where he’s going. There’s one person he can still trust, one person who can help him make sense of what happened.

He parks beside the Rumanceks’ mailbox and jogs down the steps. The graffiti on the trailer has faded, but it still needs a good power-washing and repainting before it’ll be gone completely. He thought about cleaning it up a few months ago, but he couldn’t bear to come back.

“Lynda!” He knocks on their door. “Lynda?”

The door creaks open. She looks him over and Roman has no idea what she sees, but it makes her sigh, sad and tired.

“You better come on in. Come on.”  She holds the door open for him and then ushers him to the couch.

It feels surreal, sitting on this couch, in this place again. It’s not the same—the trailer is only half cleaned and not quite put to rights, but there’s enough furniture to make it not feel so empty. He can’t figure out if he’s reassured or unsettled by it.

“I wish a hell of a lot of things went differently,” Lynda says, sitting in the armchair. “I wish we’d never left, not like that.” She takes a breath. “So, what do you need?”

Roman pauses. There it is again, the same question with the same answer. He can’t say it this time.

“What do I need to do to fix this?” 

The moment it leaves his mouth, he knows he’s echoing himself, but he can’t help it. The feeling is the same, the need to know what to do to keep the few people left who matter in his life.

Lynda touches his hand. “Oh, sweet boy, there isn’t anything you need to do.”

Roman looks at her hand on his, the rings on her fingers. “I don’t understand,” he says and it’s the most honest he’s been in longer than he cares to remember. It’s at the heart of everything that happens to him, around him—he doesn’t understand why or how or what it is that makes things fall apart. Or maybe he does. Maybe it’s this thing he’s become since she—died. Maybe it’s always been in him and he never knew it, this ugly part of him that’s always made him feel like there was a secret written on his back that everyone could see, something no one would ever tell him.

Lynda pulls her hand away and clasps them together in her hand. “Our people never settle for long and we don’t often come back. Peter ran. It’s what we do, it’s what he knows. I’m not saying it’s right—he messed up and he knows it. But you need to know that it’s not anything you did. We only came back because of you.” She pauses, looks at him carefully. “You’ve never been the reason for anyone coming back, have you?”

“No.”

It sounds like a question. But he knows, like a terrible secret, that his own father wouldn’t stay for him.

She takes both of his hands in hers. “As risky as it was getting for us, I wish we had never left for your sake.” When Roman doesn’t have a response to that she squeezes his hands and then lets them go. “Now, are you going back to school?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Then you can help me today. I need a new coffee table and a new dining table. Some dishes, different curtains. You can be my heavy-lifter.” She smiles and it’s the first moment in a year that things have felt okay.

\--

Of course, by the time they’ve unloaded Lynda’s purchases and set up the new furniture, the bus drops off Peter. It takes him longer than it should to come inside. Lynda rubs her hand against Roman’s back and then takes a mug of tea with her outside.

Peter hesitates by the door. Roman leans back against the new dining table and hopes he looks calmer than Peter appears. He’s not sure where all his defenses left to or when they disappeared, but he doesn’t have them around Peter.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d actually turn up here,” Peter says and drops his backpack on the floor.

“I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”

Peter winces. “Yeah. That was…a mistake.”

“A mistake.”

It doesn’t begin to describe what happened to Roman, a grain of salt on the scale of things. It’s laughable and Roman thinks he would laugh if it didn’t hurt so much.

“It was wrong,” Peter says with more confidence. “I fucked it up. That’s the truth. You lost basically your whole family and I ran away.”

“Thanks,” Roman swallows painfully, crosses his arms, and hides the scars on them against his chest as if Peter could see through this sleeves, “for reminding me.”

“It needed to be said,” Peter says, unflinching this time. “ _I_ needed to say it, get it out there. I’m a piece of shit friend and I don’t expect you to forgive me. I just needed to come back and,” he shrugs, “be whatever you need me to be. I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.”

“Not much,” Roman says. “Not as much as coming back.”

Peter’s expression finally starts to relax. “We okay? I mean, not now, but…eventually?”

“I think so.” Roman’s voice wavers. “I need us to be.”

“Okay. Good.”

Peter’s shoulders relax, his whole body loosens up, relieved, but not of responsibility. By comparison, Roman still feels tense, still uncertain. He thinks Norman would tell him something about that being a healthy reaction—of course he wouldn’t be able to trust Peter so soon; it’s not that easy. He wishes it was.

“What now?” he asks because he doesn’t want to go back to the mansion, but he doesn’t know how to proceed from here.

Lynda comes inside and the look on her face makes Roman think she’s heard everything perfectly fine. He’s not actually bothered by it when she confirms it by saying, “Now, you have dinner with us. I hope you don’t mind something easy. We haven’t had a chance to stock up on everything.”

“That’s fine, really. Do you need any help?”

She smiles at him. “It’s okay. Just sit and relax.”

He realizes then that all of the nervous symptoms he’s dealt with for a year haven’t made an appearance since shopping with Lynda. Both Roman and Peter sit at the new dining table, Peter rubbing a finger over the wood finish—which isn’t new; it’s all second-hand because Lynda wouldn’t let him pay for anything—with approval.

“No dings, no scratches, no uneven legs—I am impressed.”

Lynda shoots him a grin. “Not even Roman can put a dent in my haggling skills.”

Peter directs a look at him, smirk on his lips, the tilt of his eyebrows asking.

Roman spreads out his hands. “No, really, I’ve never seen anyone work the shops and yard sales quite like your mom.”

So, Roman stays for dinner, burgers and cheesy rice, and there’s a slowly warming atmosphere around them, small conversation and familiar voices that go a long way to ease the uncertainty between him and everything else. But the end of his social stay comes abruptly. Lynda asks him if he wants another refill on tea and the pot is nearly empty. The dishes are drying in a rack on the counter, the leftovers packed away. They’ve been sitting at the table, talking about where the Rumanceks had been in the past year, Peter admitting to a lot of anger and grief and Lynda attesting to the loneliness that followed them out of the grove. 

Roman shares a little—the way Norman has been checking on him, the hugeness of the Godfrey house. But he doesn’t say anything about the scars on his arms, settled in like they’ve been there for years instead of a fraction of that time, not about the way his canines sharpen when he’s really hungry, not about the absence of nosebleeds when he does his mind-control trick. That’s for later, when things are more back to the way they were.

But the tea is nearly gone and that means he should bow out, get back in his car, and drive home. His grip tightens around his mug and his thumb worries at a small crack in the porcelain.

“I should probably get back home.”

Both of the Rumanceks pause. Lynda frowns and set the teapot back on the table. “Oh,” she says, “Sure. It is getting late, isn’t it.”

“Yeah, I…” He stands up from the table, looks at both of them. “Thanks for dinner.”

“Of course.” Lynda reaches out and squeezes his hand. “You come back anytime, okay? You’re always welcome here.”

He thanks her again and Peter follows him outside. Now, as they walk toward the stairs, _now_ is when the nervous flutters starts up in his stomach. Each step he takes closer to leaving, the surer he is that he doesn’t want to leave. He stops before he can put a foot on the first step. Peter’s watching him with the same impassive face from this morning.

“I don’t…” Roman puts his hands in his pockets, just in case they shake he doesn’t want Peter to see. “I don’t want to go back yet.”

A smile shifts Peter’s mouth upward, breaks the straight line of his eyebrows. He claps Roman on the arm and turns back to the house. “You can try out our new couch.”

Lynda looks pleased when she sees them both come back inside and retrieves some blankets from the closet. When it comes time, they both bid him goodnight and retreat to their rooms. For a while, Roman can’t get to sleep. Most of it is the worry that it’s all been a dream, so he tells himself he’s being stupid and closes his eyes.

He jolts awake in total darkness, heart hammering, and it takes him a few seconds to realize that he’s in the Rumanceks’ living room. He’d forgotten how dark the woods can be, up on his hill, in his house of many lights. Roman sits up and combs back his hair with his fingers, breathes. Not a minute later, he hears a door open, padding footsteps down the hall, and then a light switches on in the kitchen. Peter, dressed in just sweatpants, sits down on the couch beside him. There’s a few beats of silence while Roman listens to his heart rate even out again. It’s mid-fall, so the living room is fairly cold this time of night; Roman tosses one half of the blanket that’s still covering him to Peter, who pulls it up to his neck. Their shoulders brush.

“Want to know a secret?” Peter asks quietly and even that seems too loud in the dark.

“What?”

“We still have the same dreams.”

It only takes a second for that to click. “Oh, fuck.”

“Hey.” Under the blanket, Peter’s hand holds his wrist. “Hey. I don’t know if it’s been every dream—I don’t think so. It’s only every now and then that I get them.”

Roman feels vaguely sick. His thoughts are crowding his head—what has Peter seen, how much does he know now, why didn’t he come back sooner if he _knew?_ He can’t deal with the idea of talking about all of that now, so, grappling for a calmer train of thought, he asks, “Why didn’t I get any of your dreams?”

Peter shrugs, his shoulder moving against Roman’s. “I don’t know. I haven’t been able to remember any of my dreams for the past year. You don’t have to talk about any of it now, you know. Just…wanted you to know.”

“Okay.” Roman takes a deep breath. “Okay.”

Peter takes his hand away, but leans more of his weight into Roman’s shoulder. Belatedly, he realizes that he hadn’t been afraid of Peter noticing the thick line of scar tissue, wonders if he did notice or if he knows at all.

“You know what I think this whole thing with the dreams means?” Peter sinks lower on the couch. His head nearly rests on Roman’s shoulder. “Means we’re not done. This isn’t over, us, whatever’s been going on in this town.” He pauses. “I’m not walking away again.”

“Is that a promise?” Roman asks, struggling for calm, but his voice has little strength under the weight of Peter’s words.

“As fucking near as I can make it be one.”

This time, Roman lets himself trust it and another part of him relaxes. They go quiet in the darkness of the living room, comfortable in the collective body heat under the blanket. Peter falls asleep first and his head finally slides down against Roman’s shoulder. He registers the touch just before he loses consciousness. It feels like things are finally falling back into place.


End file.
